


Golden Silence

by nonky



Category: Nancy Drew (TV 2019)
Genre: Gen, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-24
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:48:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21543271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonky/pseuds/nonky
Summary: There was enough to go on to officially have the police make Carson Drew a murder suspect, and Nancy had moved from obstructing justice for her own ends to doing so because she wasn't sure her father didn't need more protection. Loving her father was tangled in the sin of omission of a pink tulle shroud calling out to be found.Spoilers for episode 7.
Kudos: 6
Collections: Nancy Drew TV Series (2019)





	Golden Silence

Nancy went home, unable to handle the sad, longing way Nick had looked at her before he dumped her. He was watching for her to break, and she was tired of breaking. She wanted to have one thing that patched over the missing pieces of the confident young woman she'd been when her mother was alive. Seeing Nick had started out as that one good and easy part of her life. 

Trusting anyone was starting to feel like a mistake. Having them trust her might be worse. Anything she'd said around Ace might be known to the police. Nancy hadn't told Nick, Bess or George not to speak freely around Ace, and it might be too late. He'd been helping Nick access the files on Tiffany's drive. It was only luck she hadn't said anything about the bloody dress. She didn't think Nick would go out of his way to tell people about the $50,000 payout, but neither would he hide it if it led where he needed the police looking.

There was enough to go on to officially have the police make Carson Drew a murder suspect, and Nancy had moved from obstructing justice for her own ends to doing so because she wasn't sure her father didn't need more protection. Loving her father was tangled in the sin of omission of a pink tulle shroud calling out to be found. 

If she hadn't been so stuck on that one piece of evidence, she could have followed all the others more effectively. But she'd left it in the attic, unwilling to take it seriously. It was such an obvious failure in a cover-up to keep a distinctive dress worn by a beauty pageant winner on the day of her famous murder. It was too obvious for her father to have made that mistake. She hadn't believed his story about a prank on her mother. It wasn't tasteful, and Kate Drew wouldn't have laughed at a Dead Lucy prank. 

She must not have known. She couldn't have known her husband's work involved anything about dead teenage girls. She was a social worker. She'd given birth to Nancy the next year. Murder wasn't something to overlook for a good job. They were middle class, but neither of her parents had aspirations for millions from their work. They wanted to have a good quality of life, but money wouldn't have paved over a crime. 

Sometime in the years after Lucy died, Carson had quit working for the Hudsons, and he'd only gone back recently when he needed bail money urgently. Nancy had pushed him back into their grasp, even without the haunting. Instead of helping her father anchor himself in the difficulty of rebuilding his life, she was actively undoing the good Kate had enacted in her lifetime. 

There were witnesses because it was that small a town. Unfortunately, everyone seemed to have agreed to let Lucy shriek in the limbo with no life and no peace surrounding her death. People didn't get to decide she was unimportant, a fireside tale in the brochure instead of a real person robbed of her identity as much as her life. No one had tried after a very brief, perfunctory effort.

Nancy hadn't believed in curses, and she hadn't believed in ghosts. But Lucy Sable had held Nancy's hand around her bracelet, answered questions, and melted ancient gold coins into a fused puddle of smoking metal. Too much had happened to stand on denial of the situation. Either her sanity was failing, along with all her friends who had witnessed the different apparitions, or there were forces she had no idea how to investigate. She didn't even know how to escape them, or seek them out. The dead couldn't kill, but they also couldn't help. 

The living couldn't be trusted, the dead were mute, and her own mind refused to land on a way forward. She had no practical way to continue, no supernatural angle to follow, and was limited to carefully picking who overheard information. All her unofficial resources had dried up at once, leaving her with a very dangerous partnership from McInnis. Nancy wasn't sure she didn't agree with Laura's assessment of the Police Chief. If he worked for the Hudsons, she didn't want to work with him. 

She wasn't surprised to see her father had carried on with his dinner plans. He was very careful not to make promises he couldn't keep. She could have said a million things, most of them harmless. He would be able to tell she was wobbly and let her go to an easy nothing topic. 

"Did you kill Lucy Sable?"

She had wanted anything from her father in that moment. Anger and insult would have been wonderful. Surprise if it came across genuinely, or a paternal exasperation as he gave up on her for a hopeless troublemaker. Anything except the fear she knew she saw before her own nerve gave out.

"NO! Wait, don't tell me. Don't say anything," Nancy said. "You can't trust anyone with any bit of information linking you to it."

The truth was like an enormous mirror, shattered into thousands of knives waiting to cut someone. The shards of it were sitting out, washed into gutters and plastered into colourful planters on town squares. Clues didn't die like people, and they could look like harmless things until someone knew to use them as weapons.

"I know you worked for the Hudsons when she died, and Ryan had dated her. I know Lucy saw Celia Hudson with a man who wasn't her own husband, at an exclusive party about a year before she died. I know three days after Lucy's body was found, the Hudsons paid you a lot of money from a weird shipping company address that wouldn't be directly linked to them without some digging. I know that was Lucy's dress and you must have gotten rid of it. My friends all know some of this, but none of them know all of it. If we have to cover this up, Dad, we only have a little bit of time."

She took his hand and felt how cold it was, as if his blood had stopped circulating. 

"I didn't know what to do," she told him. "But I know what Mom would do. She'd protect you. How do I do that? How can I unsee some of those things? How do we explain them away?"

Out in the hallway, her phone started ringing, and when she didn't answer both phones were going off with text messages. It wasn't enough to break her concentration on Carson's face, but he pulled his hand away and stood up. 

"Don't answer it!"

It couldn't be good news. Nancy had to deal with one problem at a time now, and her one problem that mattered was keeping her father. She was barely hanging on with one parent. Losing him was too dark to face. 

She slumped as he ignored her, walking quickly to pick up one of the phones.

"Hello?"

She had lost Nick, and Carson might be next. Finding nothing would have been better than the collection of dirt taken from Lucy's grave piling around her father, slowly rising up to his neck.


End file.
